September 8th, 1998, 4:37 EDT
  WAMU FM Radio, "All Things Considered"  

THE CHIPPEWAS & WELFARE REFORM
 
 
 

NOAH ADAMS, Coanchor: In much of the country, welfare-to-work efforts are finding success with help, of course, from a economy that's producing a lot of entry level jobs. The welfare rolls have shrunk by four million since Congress passed welfare reform two years ago.
 

ADAMS: But the picture is much different on most Indian reservations. On the Red Lake Chippewa Reservation in Northwestern Minnesota, four out of ten households receive public assistance. NPR's John Bewin reports.
 

JOHN BEWIN, Reporter: Cheryl Thunder's small brown house is tucked in the woods four miles west of the reservation village of Red Lake, but the conversation over her dining table could take place anywhere in America. Under a ceiling fan, Cheryl and her fifteen year old daughter, Tiffany, are talking about the reddish-orange streaks in Tiffany's black hair.
 

TIFFANY THUNDER, Daughter: All my friends dye their hair from like a reddish color, to an orange-ish, to a yellow, to a blonde.
 

CHERYL THUNDER, Mother: It's a weird, weird generation. (Laughs) We were cool.
 

BEWIN: Cheryl Thunder is forty-one. On a summer afternoon as usual, she's home with Tiffany and her other daughter, twelve year old Cody. Cheryl smokes low tar cigarettes and measures pieces of fabric for a Grass Dance outfit she's making. It's a fringed costume that young men wear for a traditional Chippewa dance at pow-wows.
 

THUNDER: I've been brainstorming, trying to figure out how I'm going to get some extra money. If I get to sell this, then I can pay some of my bills, or help pay my mom back. You know, sort of stuff like that.
 

BEWIN: If Cheryl could get, say, $150.00 for the Grass Dance outfit, that might be enough to fix her badly leaking shower head.
 

THUNDER: We're only having cauliflower because I can't afford it right now...
 

BEWIN: Or to pay a late light bill, or repair the brakes on her troubled old Chevy, or fix the front screen door that's now patched with gray tape.
 

THUNDER: You know, Indians have to...They're smart in their own ways, you know? Because we've been poor all our lives. We've been poor and you've just got to make do with what you have, you know? On my screen now, we accidentally pushed the whole screen out and it bent the whole frame. I said, well, I've got a big piece of screen, all this taping. And that's what we call that duct tape; we call it "Indian repairs". (Laughs)
 

BEWIN: That's what it's like, Thunder says, trying to live on food stamps and a $412 a month welfare check. Things were better once. In the 1980's she and her ex-husband both worked; Cheryl as a pharmacy assistant at the tribal hospital. But then they divorced, her "ex" moved away and does not pay child support. Cheryl says she suffered a stretch of bad health, so in 1991 she quit and went on AFDC.
 

C. THUNDER: In my case, I thought it would be better for me to stay home with my kids and take care of them and let them feel secure at home. With me, because I was the only parent. And I think...I think that I did a good job with them, you know? But now that they're older, I'm anxious to go look for a job.
 

BEWIN: Anxious and required. After Congress passed the Welfare Reform Law of 1996, Minnesota like other states set up a program that demands recipients look for work in order to get a check. Cheryl Thunder has a better chance of making it into the workforce than many in Indian country. She finished high school and succeeded at a full time job. Most of the 580 welfare recipients on the Red Lake Reservation lack her credentials and many have deeper problems.
 

BEWIN: Some of Merceline White's six children play with a squirt gun in a dirt yard outside their small box of a house. In contrast to Cheryl Thunder's duct tape screen door, White's door has no screen at all. She won't let me record her, but she stands at the door and politely answers questions.
 

BEWIN: She did work once, about ten years ago, cleaning at the Red Lake Mission School. But now she's afraid to work, she says, because she has occasional seizures. Her cousin, Cheryl Thunder, tells me later that Merceline's seizures may have been caused by drinking or by a beating she took from her boyfriend. White says the welfare people sanctioned her once, cut her check down for not participating in job programs. She says she told them that, if necessary, she'll just live in the woods and survive off the land like the old people did. Later, though, I asked again what she'll do if forced to work or lose all benefits. White shrugs and says she'll probably look for work.
 

BEWIN: Red Lake officials say hundreds of tribe members have little or no work experience and some 70% are alcoholic or drug addicted.
 

FRANK DICKINSON, Chippewa Spiritual Elder: We're dying from alcoholism and drug use. We have people who are coming to the sweat lodge over here, who have been drinking all their lives and want to get straightened out. And where do I begin? How do I begin to walk a good road?
 

BEWIN: A jack pine fire is heating stones for a sweat lodge ceremony in the woods back of Frank Dickinson's house. Dickinson is a sixty-nine year old spiritual elder. He says forty years ago, he almost drank himself to death while living in Minneapolis. He worked his way back to health and sobriety through Chippewa spirituality, the sweat lodge, and fasting. Now he helps others do the same. He works with a lot of people on welfare. He says many are not ready to work.
 

DICKINSON: The welfare-to-work program is going to be a disaster. These women that are here got children. That's no fault of their own; they just got caught up in this whole bureaucratic kind of a life. And they're the ones that are paying for it. Some of these women have no alternative but to accept that because they have no income.
 

BEWIN: In fact, it may not make much difference whether you're eager and able like Cheryl Thunder, or troubled and resistant like Merceline White. Either way, you've got few options on the Red Lake Reservation. Only about half of the tribes 1,500 households have a full time worker and most of them hold tribal government jobs. Commerce is strikingly scarce here. The reservation's biggest town, Red Lake, is home to 1,800 people, but it has all the business activity of a country crossroads: a combined gas station and grocery store, and one cafe that's open only sporadically. That's about it.
 

BEWIN: (Electronic music clip...) That is, except for the small and rather dingy casino and bingo hall in a shed-like building next to the highway. On this day, more than half of the twenty or so slot machine players appear to be tribe members. The Red Lake Band has two other small casinos on tribe-owned land off the reservation, but they too are far from any large population. So while gambling has enriched some tribes near big cities, Red Lake's casinos give the tribal government only a modest revenue boost and employ about 250 members.
 

DAN KING, Tribal Treasurer: The first thing that hit me is, there's not any businesses or jobs up here. What do people...How do people survive?
 

BEWIN: Dan King is the Red Lake Band's newly elected tribal treasurer. He grew up in Minneapolis and got a college degree and an MBA before moving to his home reservation in the late 1980's. Though it might not seem possible, King says Red Lake's economy has gotten worse lately. King takes us for a boat ride on the huge Red Lake. It covers almost half of the Rhode Island-sized reservation and was long a key asset for the tribe. King says until a few years ago, the boats of Chippewa commercial fishers dotted the big water on summer days.
 

KING: Because every family fished. If they didn't have a full time fisherman, they probably had somebody who fished part time, or they had somebody who worked at the fisheries, or somebody who was hired by fishermen. It was a big part of life here for many, many years.
 

BEWIN: But the lake reaches to the horizon with no other boats in sight. Red Lake fishers called a moratorium two years ago. The walleyed pike they used to net by the ton for sale in restaurants and grocery stores are almost gone. King says many Red Lakers ignored quotas and caught extra walleyes for the black market.
 

KING: And you can't really blame people for doing that. I mean, they're doing that as a survival mechanism to take care of their families and more and more people fishing, more nets in the water. Overfishing due to necessity, you know, because there's no other jobs.
 

MAURICE STATLEY, Fmr. Fisherman: I used to make a good living off the lake. Very good living. Ten, twenty, thirty thousand sometimes, in good years.
 

BEWIN: Former fisherman Maurice Statley is a wiry, thirty-nine year old man. He wears a T-shirt with the sleeves torn off and a camouflaged hunting cap backwards over his long black hair. He stands in his yard on the southern shore of Red Lake among a collection of dead and dying appliances. He's cleaning bite-sized perch he caught on a nearby river. Most anglers would toss them back, but Statley figures they'll make a good meal. His income isn't what it used to be.
 

STATLEY: Once fishing ended, I had three boats so I didn't have no more use for them boats so, you know, I have to sell the boats just to get by the first year or two.
 

BEWIN: Red Lake officials say it will be another five years or more before fishers like Statley can go back to netting walleyes. But unlike some people he knows, Statley and his family of seven have not been forced onto welfare by the moratorium. The family is just getting by; Statley's wife is a home health aide and Maurice has turned from walleye to another natural resource.
 

STATLEY: I keep about a hundred pounds of leeches in this thing all the time.
 

BEWIN: Statley shows off a makeshift tent that houses a pump system and two big tanks of leeches. He sells the creatures to the bait shop market. On a good day, he says he makes a hundred dollars, but the hours are brutal. Statley sets his traps in the lake at sunset and checks them long before sunrise.
 

STATLEY: Pretty much the same, almost the same always as fishing. I get up about three o'clock in the morning, try to get them done before daylight - the majority of them. And then I bring them on home and take care of them, sort them out, clean them up, and then I take them out to wholesalers.
 

BEWIN: Even if all reservation Indians were as enterprising as Statley, most could not make a living trapping leeches, picking blueberries, or making crafts from birchbark. The income is spare and seasonal and the resources are finite, as the fished-out Red Lake proves. But even in depressed reservation economies, welfare-to-work is the law. On a Monday morning, about twenty-five welfare recipients sit at long tables in a cavernous room that also serves as the tribe's Bingo hall.
 

JASON BLOOMER, Trainer: I'm Jason Bloomer. Most of you saw Deb last week. She's up for a teaching job...
 

BEWIN: Along with coffee and fruit punch, Bloomer offers a primer on how to get and keep a job. His emphasis is on basics, like showing up consistently.
 

BLOOMER: Today, we'll talk about what you can do when things go wrong. You know, things go off from time to time. Who knows what? Cars break down, babysitters can't come in. Family emergencies...
 

BEWIN: Employment training has long been available at Red Lake, but now it's required for welfare recipients, so enrollment has ballooned from less than a hundred to more than four hundred. Cheryl Thunder finds the classes boring and insulting.
 

THUNDER: Like everybody's illiterate, everybody's stupid, everybody's dumb. They don't know how to look for a job, how to fill out an application, how to do this, you know.
 

BEWIN: Cheryl knows how to do those things, but that isn't making her job search easy.
 

THUNDER: (On phone:) Hello? See, I'm calling to check on a position that I applied for here in Red Lake. It was for the pharmacy technician and I'm just trying to find out who got selected.
 

BEWIN; Cheryl has applications in for half a dozen jobs, several in surrounding towns and one with her former employer at the tribal hospital up the road.
 

THUNDER: Yes...
 

BEWIN: She's been looking for four months.
 

THUNDER: So it's going to take a while then? Okay, then. Thanks. Yep, 'bye.
 

BEWIN: A couple weeks after my visit, Cheryl got a job. She's driving thirty miles off the reservation to make six dollars an hour at a wild rice processing plant. The job is seasonal; it ends in October. Cheryl is still looking for permanent work. (Music clip...)
 

ADAMS: Creating job opportunities on the reservation requires more than just inviting businesses in. John Bewin's story will continue in just a minute on NPR's "All Things Considered". (TEASERS)
 

ROBERT SIEGEL, Coanchor: When Congress passed the welfare reform law of 1996, it acknowledged the extreme scarcity of jobs on some Indian reservations. The law exempts tribes with a jobless rate above 50% from the five year, lifetime limit on welfare assistance, but the Red Lake Band of Chippewa in Northern Minnesota won't get the exemption because their jobless rate is 42%. John Bewin continues his report.
 

BEWIN: It's just thirty miles from the Red Lake Reservation to Bemidgee (sp?), a growing college and tourist town of 11,000. Bemidgee boasts a big lakeside statue of Paul Bunyon and Babe, the blue ox.
 

UNIDENTIFIED CHILD: There they are. There they are, Mama...
 

UNIDENTIFIED MOTHER: They're big, aren't they?
 

CHILD: Yeah...
 

BEWIN: Every summer, thousands of tourists stop in Bemidgee on their way to fishing resorts, biking trails, or the nearby headwaters of the Mississippi River. But almost none head straight north to the Red Lake Nation, despite its twenty-five lakes. Red Lake itself is the second biggest of Minnesota's ten thousand plus lakes, but there are no resorts on its shores, just mile after mile of trees and prairie grass. The lake is little more developed than it was in 1750 when the Chippewa migrated here and named Red Lake for its color at sunset. That makes for pretty scenery, but given the reservation's 60% poverty rate, it's hard not to see it another way: Red Lake is an economic black hole in an otherwise robust region. The tribe has not gone out of its way to invite the world in.
 

BOBBY WHITEFEATHER, Tribal Chairman: There was reluctance to open the doors, say, for a lot of outside influence.
 

BEWIN: That's Red Lake Tribal Chairman Bobby Whitefeather.
 

WHITEFEATHER: Principally because of our distrust of not only the United States Government, but also individuals that didn't really have a vested interest in our way of life here, other than trying to make some monetary gain out of it.
 

BEWIN: Whitefeather isn't just talking about the big injustices: the brutal conquest of Indians, the broken treaties, the white loggers who illegally clear-cut Red Lake's forests a hundred years ago. Tribe members also talk about daily insults that continue to this day. Some say they feel unwelcome in Bemidgee stores. Whitefeather tells of a vacuum cleaner rep who sold a model to his unworldly parents, though they had no carpeting.
 

WHITEFEATHER: I didn't know they used that for carpets. I didn't know what carpet was. And it's just story, after story, after story, about those kinds of things.
 

BEWIN: Tribal leaders say, given generations of mistrust, it's not surprising they've made only occasional attempts to bring outside industry into the reservation. The old federal welfare system indirectly supported that posture. For sixty years, tribes like Red Lake could largely shun the outside world and rely on welfare to support their unemployed members, says tribal Treasurer, Dan King.
 

KING: But I think that welfare reform has really brought a lot of that isolationism to the forefront. And tribes are now asking themselves, do we really want this? We're looking at this minimal pittance that we're getting from welfare. That might be gone now, so how are we going to survive?
 

ROBERT HOLLIS, Red Lake Tribe member: We could build a golf course. We could build a hotel. We could do a villa- type operation.
 

BEWIN: Robert Hollis is a Red Lake tribe member and a Minneapolis based hotel and restaurant consultant. We meet at Warroad(sp?), a small town near the Canadian border, a hundred miles north of Red Lake. The tribe owns a small casino in Warroad. Hollis helped it develop a modest but handsome restaurant nearby. It opened last summer.
 

HOLLIS: Of course, it's a complement to the casino. Next door, we have a place where we can hopefully build some lodging facilities with this.
 

BEWIN: The restaurant employs just a couple dozen Red Lakers, but Hollis thinks hospitality is the tribe's future. He dreams of putting more than a thousand tribe members to work with an ambitious tourist attraction anchored by a first class casino and located on the reservation.
 

HOLLIS: Depending on the size and the location, we could employ just about everybody in the whole tribe.
 

BEWIN: Tribal leaders say they like the idea, but they're cautious. They say they'll have to build a consensus among older and more traditional members that the tribe should invite the tourists in. Elder Frank Dickinson says he's pleased that tribal leaders are thinking big.
 

DICKINSON: We need the money to survive. We all know that.
 

BEWIN: But he offers warnings. He says the tribe must not lift its current ban on alcohol sales. Selling booze to entice casino visitors would speed the self-destruction of alcohol with Red Lakers. And, he says, the tribe must not trade what's left of Chippewa culture and the reservation's sacred trees and waters to become just another tourist destination.
 

DICKINSON: Are we going to sell off some of our beings, or our self-righteousness, or whatever we have? I'm in favor of everything of what they're saying. But let's take a look at it again from the native standpoint of it, not from a white man's perspective over here. We're native people. We're different.
 

BEWIN: In the meantime, the Red Lake Band is moving ahead with smaller, less controversial job creation efforts. A tribe owned construction company will expand and try to sell modular homes off the reservation, and Tribal Chairman Bobby Whitefeather is working on a rare partnership with a non-Indian business owner. Ron Anderson owns Anderson Fabrics, a fast growing manufacturing company in Black Duck, Minnesota, about thirty-five miles east of Red Lake.
 

RON ANDERSON, Anderson Fabrics: It was Bobby's idea. Maybe we could take part of this operation and move it there, rather than trying to get employees down here.
 

BEWIN: Anderson's company makes custom linens, bedspreads, and window treatments for hotel chains and other businesses. He and the tribal government agreed to build an Anderson plant on the reservation next year, creating thirty jobs with plans for more.
 

ANDERSON: We need to expand more and it doesn't pay for us to continue to build buildings if we can't find enough people to fill them.
 

BEWIN: Anderson looks like a perfect match for the Red Lake Tribe. He's got entry level jobs in search of workers. He openly worries, though, about the quality of the Red Lake workforce. He employs some tribe members now; he says while some are good workers, others don't perform well because they've never held a job before, or they stopped showing up when their car breaks down. There's no public transportation in the area. Tribal Chairman Whitefeather concedes the problem; he says it took five or six years to build a stable workforce at the tribe's small casinos. And that meant allowing some tribe members to fail repeatedly.
 

WHITEFEATHER: If a person didn't work out the first time, give him a chance again a second time. Usually by the third time, it takes hold. But, yeah, I know what the responsibilities are now.
 

BEWIN: Tribal leaders say it will take time to overcome welfare dependency on poor reservations, maybe more time than federal law gives them. Time to teach reliable clock punching, time to overcome staggering rates of chemical dependency, time to create jobs. Spiritual elder Frank Dickinson thinks aggressive economic development is half the answer; he says the other half is a revival of Chippewa ways to restore his people to health and self respect.
 

DICKINSON: Our kids today need to have that cultural, traditional guide in their interior lives. Otherwise, they're going to be doomed. And that's what it tells you in the prophecies.
 

BEWIN: Many in Indian country express ambivalence about welfare reform. They hope it will energize efforts to create jobs and to solve social ills that welfare never solved. But they fear those efforts will fall short and time limits will bring unimagined hardship. Welfare recipients who don't find work start hitting the end of their lifetime limits in 2002. John Bewin, NPR News, Red Lake, Minnesota.
 
 

(END)